Luetkemeyer, Wagner named to head financial services subcommittees

WASHINGTON • Reps. Blaine Luetkemeyer and Ann Wagner will chair separate House of Representatives subcommittees that could be at a nexus of Republican efforts to peel away at Obama administration regulations on the financial industry after Donald Trump becomes president.

Luetkemeyer, R-St. Elizabeth, announced Friday that he had been named chair of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit. He has been on the whole committee for six years.

Wagner will head the oversight and investigations panel of the same House Financial Services Committee.

Both have opposed Obama administration initiatives that the Obama administration says were designed to protect consumers against financial industry regulations. Republicans called them onerous and politically motivated.

Luetkemeyer was a leading critic of Operation Choke Point, an Obama initiative aimed at payday lending and at banks and other third-party processors providing services to industries that may pose a risk to the institutions’ reputations.

Luetkemeyer and other Republicans said the program was a thinly-disguised attempt to go after legitimate businesses the administration likes, such as gun and ammunition merchants.

Obama administration officials said Operation Choke Point is a consumer-protection initiative and was not politically motivated.

She said in a statement Friday that she will use the position to push back against the rise of “imperial Washington” under President Barack Obama, which she said had a “crushing weight of regulations harming small businesses and families from the coasts to the heartland.”

Her subommittee has oversight of the Federal Reserve, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Credit Union Administration, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and the Export-Import Bank.

Luetkemeyer, 64, served as chairman of the Financial Services Committee while he was a Missouri state representative from 1999-2005. He was former Gov. Matt Blunt’s director of tourism before being elected to Congress in 2008.

Wagner, 54, was first elected to Congress in 2012. She previously was ambassador to Luxembourg during George W. Bush’s presidency.